Google plans to shut down Google Voice integration with classic Hangouts | Hacker News Reader

Google plans to shut down Google Voice integration with classic Hangouts

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215 pointsdefinetheword285 comments

I seem to remember just about 4 years ago when I logged into Google Voice and it said that Google Voice was moving into Google Hangouts.

https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2014/09/google-vo...

Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

I’ve been staying clear of Google Meets for this reason. Zero desire to trust them with something as critical as messaging.

It's a shame webrtc uses it's own protocol. Otherwise there would probably be dozens of self hostable alternatives.

webrtc uses its own protocol?

It's not dozens, but Jitsi is a very decent open-source self-hostable alternative to Google Meet or Zoom.

WebRTC is an open standard, you can absolutely self-host a WebRTC video chat site, and there are many implementations available like Jitsi.

Google arguably had first mover advantage in the video space which was the promised land even before Covid blessed it.

And yet by the time it hit this year, Zoom took the prize. I think this represents a much bigger fail on Google's part than I have seen being mentioned.

Nobody expects Google to competently execute. Their failures aren’t newsworthy.

Compare the effect on competitors’ stock prices when Amazon or Apple announce they’re moving into a market versus Google or Microsoft.

Skype had about a 10 year head start on this and amazingly it's like the one brand I don't hear mentioned at all when it comes to video chat

Both Microsoft and Google dropped the ball bigtime by letting WhatsApp take the whole international messaging market.

I remember how refreshingly easy to use Whatsapp was when it came out. It was such a pain to transfer contacts and images and whatnot before, and having to worry about international MMS/SMS charges. Then this tiny little app comes along and blows all the others away by simple requiring phone number verification.

Didn't they abandon that product for Teams, for enterprise users/customers?

Teams has on the order of 75 million daily active users, but it's the typical Microsoft story. Not widely talked about among startups, but totally ubiquitous in most companies.

Google meet is used for all the meetings internally. I doubt it's going to go anywhere. What would we do, pay for zoom?

Google Meet is a paid Google Workspace product. You can feel fairly comfortable about it compared to their consumer products.

> Google Meet is a paid Google Workspace product

Nest was a paid, acquired, hardware product. If a product manager gets distracted, any Google product—apart from ads—will, if not fail, dramatically degrade. Google are a terrible company to bet anything important on.

Autodesk is probably on par if not worse than Google when it comes to branding.

Does Autodesk select product names that have close associations with major porn sites? Google has (i.e. YouTube Red).

"YouTube Red is closely associated with a porn site, redtube" is quite a take!

It's a bush league blunder I don't think any really experienced branding team would make.

Let's just enjoy the beauty of "associating with a porn site is a bush league blunder."

I’m not sure it’s that crazy of a take. Those are, by far, the two most recognizable websites in the world with “tube” in the name. Naming a product in a way that calls to mind the other (for no real reason - the “Red” in YouTube Red doesn’t mean anything) is an obvious branding error.

It's the reason they renamed it YouTube Premium after a year or two.

You could double down on purchasing existing companies and just leaving them hanging out there. Softimage comes to mind, it was honestly the best of breed in it's space and they acquired it along with wavefront/Maya and just let Softimage languash while they milked it for licencing.

There's Google Voice, Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Meet, Google Meet, Google Allo, Google Duo, Google Chat. You used to be able to dial from Gmail, and then there was Hangouts Dialer, and now Meet (or is it Hangouts Meet?) is apparently part of Gmail and the Meet app is gone but the Meet website is still there.

I'm honestly confused.

Don’t forget google voice, which may or may not be related to the hangouts dialer. I was never sure about that.

I used the Hangouts Dialer to dial "from" my Google Voice number, but what I'm confused about is how the Hangouts Dialer is related to Hangouts.

You could use it to make calls from hangouts even if you didn't have a google voice number

Circa 2014 or 2015 I used Hangouts Dialer with my Google Voice number over my hotel's wifi connection to make free calls when traveling internationally. Felt good man.

I used it for awhile when I had a US bank account and lived overseas. I needed a working US phone number to authorize transactions.

I set up a google voice number just for that and it worked a treat.

>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

Have you seen the new Xbox names? Microsoft still loves to tack on Office on everything.

Not software, but allow me to introduce you to Infiniti's (carmarker) recent product line revision where every model's name starts with "Q"

The Q has an historical meaning for Infiniti.

The Q45 was their first vehicle, in ~1989. As far as I can tell, their second car was the M30, followed by the J30. Those were different (size) classes, so, historically, they've always used different letters to designate different models. While the QX4 (SUV) came out in, what, the late 90s, and ALSO began with a Q, it's never been a historical convention to just name all of their vehicles with a Q. There were only 2 "Q" vehicles, and one was actually a "QX".

I suppose you can call the Q superfluous, and then point to BMW if you want another company that just names cars by number, but at least there's a well-understood history and progression between the 3 series and the 5 series and the 7 series, but I have no idea what makes a Q60 (big number!) a sporty coupe that used to be a G35/G37 and now the QX30 is a small SUV-like-thing, that's, I guess, the size of older G35s but that means the Q60 somehow jumped 3 places in the tens column for no apparent reason.

X Microsoft X1 Xbox One X 1 Office Edition

“while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S“

It’s truly insane.

Sony: PS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5

Microsoft: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X

There just _has_ to be some monetary reason for this, it’s too insane and has gone on too long for there to not be money involved somehow. Or maybe it truly is just insanity?!

The naming conversations I've been close to for a couple of decently-high-profile consumer products really were just on the "insanity" side.

Like, everyone's argument made sense from a certain perspective, and the "common sense" ideas weren't perfect, but the compromise solutions that resulted had bigger problems. Problems which the media or public noticed more quickly than the people who had finally signed off on them internally...

My speculation for the early Xbox names would be that part of it was someone insisting that you don't want to be trying to sell Xbox 2 against PS3 - you're one behind! - and then 360 is a fun way to get a "3" in there... but then what next, you have the same problem again, 460 is nonsensical (Xbox 420 would've been fun...!), etc...

I don't know why more products dont follow the software pattern of cycling the alphabet. Pick a unique new name each time, and just run it down the alphabet for the first letter of the name. So easy.

I do really enjoy this approach and have used it affectionately for every computer I’ve owned. It becomes its own entertaining challenge to pick a new name that fits with the theme that began with my first computer, “Ambrosia.” Anyway, definitely seems like an actually useful thing for software versions. Android nailed it.

That’s exactly what happened with Xbox being a number behind when coming up with 360. The later versions could've been handled much better though, or at least just stick with increasing numbers (like 720) instead of reverting back to "One" and now "Series X".

Why do I have the feeling that “Series X” will have only one entry in the series?

There’s two now- the Series S is the entry-level model.

But that's a different "series".

Why companies won't name their products after the launch years I will never understand. Car companies seem to do just fine with it. Xbox 2001, Xbox 2005 etc.

Who wants to buy a brand new xbox 2013 in 2020?

Just jump right to 10 like everyone (even MSFT!) does.

The odd naming is consistent with MS's history of Windows naming, too. Here's the consumer Windows product line since 1992, ignoring high-end options like NT and Chinese-only releases like Windows 3.2:

Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10

I mean that sort of goes up as a general pattern, but only generally.

In the case of Windows there were two (maybe three) different product lines all called Windows. The naming makes slightly more sense in that context.

* Windows 1/2/3.0/3.1/3.11/WFW3.11 - 16-bit (with 32-bit extensions as win32s), ran on DOS

* Concurrently, NT 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 were marketed for servers instead of home users. They were fully 32 bit and separate from DOS.

* Windows 95/97/98 started naming after the year. This line eliminated DOS (from the user's perspective) and was 32-bit without the need for installing extensions.

* Concurrent with Windows 95 was NT4 which had 95's new interface based on Cairo

* At this point it was clear NT was the future for the desktop, so keeping with the year naming came Windows 2000 (which was really NT 5.0, but desktop users were by now used to year naming). But there was one more release of "old" Windows, as Millennium Edition (ME)

* The two names that dont fit are XP and Vista; these are NT 5.1 and 6.0, respectively. And now Windows 7 and 8 make more sense; we are back to the versioning we had starting with NT 3.1

* To make things more confusing, the server versions now started getting named after the year when previously that was the desktops. So we've got Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2011, and so on.

* Windows 10 is the oddball, skipping 9. I like to think someone at MS was poking fun at Apple, which skipped OS 9 to go straight to OS X, which two years later got the version 10.0. Mac OS 9 came after OS X but before OS X 10.0. I recall reading that 8.5 was originally supposed to be end of the line for classic mac os, but I don't have a source. So now there's 8.5, X 1.0, 9.0, and X 10.0, and everyone seems to think the X is a 10.

There was also Windows CE fir the ipaq handhelds. This led to the joke that MS was going to combine mobile, server, and desktop into Windows CEMENT

Never heard that particular joke. Amazing, thanks for sharing.

Yeah, I'm aware of the history. It adds more context to the mess but doesn't really make it sensible.

As for why they skipped 9, I believe I did hear a good reason for that one: people sometimes tested for Windows 95/98 by seeing if the version started with a 9, and they didn't want to clash with that. So this weirdness is simply an unintended side effect of their inconsistency in naming/versioning scheme.

I've heard that too, but can that be true? Wouldn't a lot of stuff have stopped working on Windows ME (the next edition after Windows 98) if that were the case?

No, this wasn't for Windows executables working or not working in a core binary technical compatibility sense. This was for where either an app or a website needed to test the version number against several possible versions of Windows to determine which version of Windows they were running on and react (or reject) according to the programming.

For later versions of Windows, programmers applied other tests, but none of those tests stepped on the "does it start with 9" test for 95/98. Using 9 for the version after 8.1 would have done so.

The most recent version of Nintendo's 3DS is "New 3DS".

As in, the brand-new New 3DS! New! Buy it today!

Well, there also was New iPad

I assume someone gets paid a lot of money to make these decisions, and they don't want people to think they're a drain on resources. That seems to happen a lot when large organizations overthink decisions too trivial for the CEO but too important for the intern.

Wii. Wii U.

Consumers were confused.

It doesn't always work.

I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft "loses" this generation, with their confusing name losing sales from parents and non-hardcore gamers that don't know this is a new console.

Yeah I left Nintendo out because I just wanted to poke one insane naming scheme at a time :p

Nintendo is just as bad at naming things as Microsoft. And they are very anti-gamer with all of their ludicrous attacks against fan content (most recently, their attack against the competitive melee scene)

I understand not wanting to cannibalize the flagship Smash game, but they could easily sell a remastered Melee and make so much money. They re-release everything else...

Their attacks on fans are so nonsensical. It goes beyond copyright protection. Look at how Sega treats Sonic fans. It's night and day.

Car manufacturers have a similar problem. I think naming is just hard.

Or it's easy and gets made hard unnecessarily.

I recently saw a funny YouTube video about this by CircleToonsHD [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/z1em05goyYU

It's interesting how Sony, being a Japanese company, did not skip over PS4, 4 being an unlucky number in some Asian cultures. They even skip the 4th floor in some buildings.

Microsoft takes cake at branding nightmares. This is because each time CVP/VP gets replaced (usually 3-4 years), they want to "redo" the whole thing because last guy did it all wrong. Despite of all the praise that gets showered on Satya for stock price, he is relatively detached from product side.

- That's from 2014, 6 years ago.

- There's no branding change, Google Voice is Google Voice.

- As an Android user the past 3 years, this is equivalent to Apple transitioning from iChat to iMessage, or when Apple appified/stickerified iMessage.

- It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_, it has a _direct_ replacement, scheduling and providing notice to users as it winds down over _years_ is hardly the irresponsible willy-nilly cancelling the comments here are claiming, especially because this is an integration of another product that is, and always has, its own frontend

> It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_

So, let me get this straight. 6 years ago, Google made the Google Voice user move to hangout, and 2 years later it was deprecated?

It just seems worse.

6 years ago, you could turn on a feature that let you receive Google Voice calls and messages in Hangouts.

There was a strong push to move from Voice to Hangouts. A couple of years ago the speculation was that Voice would be cancelled. See e.g. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3564825/google-voice.h... :

> But then, well, Google...Googled. It let Voice languish for years, without any attention or updates, then awkwardly half-merged it into Hangouts and had it rot away unattended for years. And we all know how the whole Hangouts saga ended (or is still in the process of ending, I guess we should say).

> A few years ago, though, something unexpected happened: Following years of neglect, Google suddenly brought Voice back to life.

You can find discussion of it on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022660 :

> Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is.

> Google voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts.

Perhaps if you didn't live through all this, you don't get why people find it annoying.

> Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_, it has a _direct_ replacement

What is the direct replacement? Spaces? Allo? Duo? Chat? Meet? Google Messages? Google+ Messenger? It's hardly clear...

I didn't even know chat.google.com existed until someone on HN linked to it a few weeks ago. I think it's pretty difficult to claim that Google's hodgepodge of overlapping chat products is anywhere close to the iChat -> iMessage change.

Think that's a strawman, though you're right, I see this argument often. Coming from iOS -> Android, my mental model is Duo is FaceTime, Chat is Slack, Meet is Zoom. Allo is iMessage.

I don't grok how this could confuse, other than to people who aren't in the ecosystem or using the products at all, and even then it seems to be giving 0 charity to the facts on the ground. No one's bemoaning the deep confusion and duplication they face between iMessage, FaceTime, Slack, and Zoom.

Edit: I'm really, really, tired of understanding, calm, takes that make an effort to have empathy and share info getting downvoted, if it's outside a mono-Apple worldview. It is literally the only tech topic where you can immediately hit -2 for no discernable reason. This didn't used to happen on HN, and that's what used to make it distinctive.

I absolutely bemoan the duplication between iMessage and FaceTime. Slack and Zoom are separate companies, different ballgame.

I believe you're still able to draw a firm enough distinction between how Slack and iMessage are designed as to understand why they would be separate products. Is that accurate, or does iMessage feel like it could be merged into Slack at no loss to you?

I don't understand, why would iMessage and slack be merged? They're separate companies.

Yup! Are you _genuinely_ unable to answer a question about products unless all the products in question are owned by the same company?

This thread feels pretty suspicious IMHO, I really, really doubt you're missing the point this widely due to irrelevant details.

The thread is about duplication of products within a company's ecosystem, what I'm not understanding is why drawing a comparison between Slack and iMessage having some duplication is relevant. (also for the record I'm not downvoting you at all, HN likes to brigade when it comes to Apple/Google ecosystem stuff)

Interlocutory techniques like refusing to engage with the posts as written, and instead nitpicking, cause those outcomes.

I highly, highly, highly doubt that you were so deeply confused by the Meet/Slack Allo/iMessage analogy that you needed me to spell out 'hypothetically, if Apple owned Slack, which of course it doesn't, would it be more usable for you to have Slack merged with iMessage?' Your complete lack of charity in interpretation forces lengthy, caveated, responses in drawn-out threads, emphasizing downvotes, and ensuring several opportunities for downvotes.

You feel like the one missing the point here. The discussion is about a change within the Google product line, what do Slack and Zoom have to do with it?

I get the impression you may be treating this as "what are the leading products in each niche for the overall ecosystem," but that doesn't really have anything to do with what's being discussed.

I see:

I, at least, wouldn't clamor for the merger of an Apple-owned Slack and iMessage.

The point being, people are conflating work messaging apps with personal messaging apps and acting like having unique versions of both is a problem. It's not.

On iOS, if it’s deprecated, what’s the replacement for Hangouts for normal users?

As far as I know there isn’t one. There are people I message with Hangouts pretty regularly and it’s never told me it’s deprecated or suggested anything else to use instead (except for just now, to switch to the dedicated Voice app for Voice, which… fine, but no suggestion to do my chatting elsewhere).

So is Hangouts deprecated? I have no idea. If it is, does that mean chatting with my Gmail contacts is deprecated?

I wouldn’t say it’s a straw man to call it confusing. Maybe the product lineup is less confusing if you’re on Android? But from where I’m sat… yep, confusing!

As parent noted, chat.google.com is the long term replacement, as you noted, Hangouts still works fine and no one's being pushed to Chat yet. It sounds like I'm being glib but you really are onto the nut of things once you've combined those two poles,

I agree, it is confusing! I wanted to make sure you meant 'chat in Gmail' before getting more specific: in that case, we are caught in a cycle of repeatedly noting Google has a deprecation timeline for cutting people over from Hangouts to chat.google.com, that's what the grandparent was referencing. It's virtually identical to Hangouts, just with modernized UI and Google sez a more stable backend. Everything works _just as it always has and will_ for your day to day user.

I’ve used Android 2010 to 2012, iOS 2012-2014 with iTunes Match, Android 2014 to 2020 with Google Music and just switched back to iOS with an iPhone 12 mini and Apple Music. I’m on Fi since 2015. After reading your message I realized how I probably should have used Android during the last year. To be honest, none of this was clear to me. I rooted for Android all the way, but at some point I started to migrate off the Google product and into an alternative when I got pushed from one service to the other for no benefits to me. On top of that, Android became more closed, with less and less apps being open source and replaced by proprietary Google apps. Now that I’m back to iOS I’m really amazed how the good parts just haven’t changed. Apple supports bringing my library just as well as iTunes Match did, for example. Also getting voice and sms on my laptop works out of the box, whereas a Fi on Android customer it sometimes worked better than other times for example I have no idea what I would use on a computer now that hangouts will be gone?

Android's SMS app offers you to scan a QR code with messages.android.com to text from your computer, a la whatsapp, for all Android users. Additionally, Google Fi users can access voicemail/SMS/phone through that same app https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-fi-web-messages/

Seems like if a product doesn't dominate a space, it's on shaky ground. At least search, youtube, maps, gmail have been relatively stable.

> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

This caught my eye. My initial reaction was to disagree that google was a software company and that it's more of a "tech/search/social media" company. Microsoft is a software company, not google. But the longer I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that google is a software company. It just provides its software as a service/subscription for your data.

> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

Ha, I was thinking this the other day as I was looking at Google Wallet / Google Pay / Android Pay and all the various permutations it has been through.

Play store hasn't been renamed in a while, though. I guess its next.

Well, Play Music is already gone at least

https://play.google.com/store/apps/theme/promotion_gpm_shutd...

> The Music store on Google Play is no longer available.

> To continue listening to your Play Music library, transfer your library to YouTube Music

You can still Play Books though?

Every once in a while I accidentally still call it Market. Somehow I found that to be such a great name that it stuck.

It really was a good name. Take anyone off the street from the (recent-ish) past and ask them what a 'play store' is. At least the word 'Market' makes a little bit more sense.

Who goes to the store to buy some extra 'play?'

They really just don't seem to have a very well thought out strategy & roadmap for much of anything new/rebranded/merged.

I have no idea what the decision making looks like for this internally, but my impression as an outsider is that there's a lot of short-term empire building. A new product manager/AVP/VP shows up and wants to gather power or just make their mark, so they rebrand or merge or kill a project to show they've done something. If something new is created, it immediately becomes subject to this dynamic.

The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs. (And I don't know how they make money on Docs so I'm still nervous there) I'm not a PaaS users/decision maker so that doesn't apply to me, but if it did then I would still be very reluctant to invest there unless it was part of an easily migrated multi-cloud strategy. I though Music was safe and got burned on that with the YT migration, which is a much inferior player. Even basic things like shuffling a play list and having it endlessly play through it don't seem to work.. at some point it wanders off to some random suggested song I don't own and don't want to listen to.

It will be years before I could feel comfortable making any other sort of Google service a daily driver for a given task, assuming they get their act together.

People do pay for enterprise GSuite, so I wouldn't expect anything super crazy there.

As a paying Google Workspace customer, I've found changes and improvements there to be well-thought-out and well-communicated. Google Cloud also has an entire deprecation policy, so I'm pretty comfortable relying on those services too.

Why wouldn't they turn off the calendar?

Docs seems ripe for being combined with drive

Docs are combined with drive.

>The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs.

Surely maps as well? Or has there been any bad news I don't know about?

Sorry, forgot about maps

So everything from pre Larry Lage era :). Definitely nothing from Pitchai's rein!

> And I don't know how they make money on Docs

By using them you're giving them complete 100% unfettered access to your data, that more than pays for itself.

I’m still sore about Google Music going away. That combined with Photos going paid was the one-two punch for me. In the process of migrating to roll-your-own solutions. There are a lot of good options in 2020!

I was an ardent supporter of Google Music. Their web app sucked. It literally took like 10 seconds just to show up! So many missing features and recommendation was worse than someone coded it up in weekend. I still stuck with them, keep paying them and keep suffering. Then they decided to migrate the damn thing to YouTube Music and everything became 10X worse overnight. Now somehow YouTube vides is same as my music! Simple features like proper playlist management were entirely missing. Obviously, lot of empire building is going on here.

So that was final nail in the coffin for Google Music. I moved everything to Spotify (thanks Soundiiz!) and realized what I was missing. I thought I would now unsubscribe and stop paying Google Music so someone up there will noice. Guess what? They had no way to unsubscribe for Google Music anymore because they rolled the whole thing to YouTube Premium. So upper management will never know that customer left in droves. The empire builders who are working in this part of Google are super smart but they only use their smartness in building empires.

What replacements for Photos are you looking at?

I was looking at OwnPhotos, Lychee, and Piwigo, but just today I turned up PhotoPrism which might be just the thing (haven’t really checked it out much yet but looks promising...Lychee seems like the tried and true open source solution afaict).

I’ve already dumped Google Drive for self-managed p2p file-sharing so it’s just a matter of hooking it up to a nice interface for family use.

If your photos are scattered over several drives and you need something to sweep then into one neat pile, try PhotoStructure (I'm the author). The current beta release is available for free in exchange for your feedback.

It's got a bunch of features you won't find with any other photo app: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

but know that the product is young, and my to-do list is long: https://photostructure.com/about/whats-next/

PhotoStructure looks awesome. I like how your site is almost a blog about the why-how etc, it showed me that your product is deeply aligned with my goals for a self-hosted photo solution.

I think you should prioritize in your “about” the ease of import from Google Takeouts (which is the killer feature for me personally at this moment anyway). You might also want to have a section that explicitly names the other “big” players in this space, since I didn’t turn up your solution when googling for “self-hosted Google Photos” when I first started down this path.

The one necessary feature that prevents me from choosing this right now vs some of the other open source solutions is a story about how to safely browse my photos using a logon with on any Internet connected device.

Speaking of, this might be a perfect use case for SQRL[0], although I’d be happy with a simple HTTPS username/password story.

Not making any promises, but let me know if you’d accept any help with your to-do list.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL

I'm still sore about Reader...

Google Music was decent. This new replacement is not so good. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" mix was generally right. The YT versions are good for about five songs and then trail off into Do Not Like. No amount of thumbs down seems to be making a positive change.

I'm still sore about Reader too. Fortunately Inoreader is about as good.

I'm surprised thumbing things down isn't helping you - it was the thing that fixed YTM for me. I wasn't thumbing things down enough, now anything I don't want to hear again I thumb down, and I mostly listen to the personalized and discovery mixes. You might need to switch/reload stations for it to take effect. And IIRC the discovery mix only updates on Wed.

Google Reader has been gone so long that I really don't remember all the features that it had.

One thing that I seem to remember it having was a social aspect. Twitter doesn't treat its lists very well but it is possible to find somebody that you want to follow, then see what lists they're on. Maybe that leads you to other people that you want to follow.

The thing about blogs is that typically the signal/noise ratio is higher than Twitter accounts.

Yup, I thought Nest was safe from Google. I was wrong.

This behavior is typically because management at the top is technically detached and focused only on financial aspects. This means actual technical strategy gets distributed to large number of desperate managers as opposed to getting systematically aggregated at the top. This same thing happened with Ballmer, Scully and now Pitchai. I think Pitchai and likely others are MBAs as well :).

Aaron Patzer, founder of Pando Daily has said that businesses should subtract $250K for every MBA and add $500K for every engineer. When you have MBA at the top, subtraction weight grows exponentially. I know I shouldn't so severely generalize MBAs so much but here we are... Just like Gates and Jobs, Larry Page chose an MBA to run the business while praising need for "product person" all their lives. All of these CEOs will show continuous revenue growth and doubling of profits somehow while products will linger in the limbo.

It is quite funny that Google has (or had) 6 different meeting apps and during COVID they are no where on the map in this business!

>It is quite funny that Google has (or had) 6 different meeting apps and during COVID they are no where on the map in this business!

I wouldn't call "adding 2 million users per day" nowhere on the map... Google Meet is growing tremendously and seeing huge attach rates, even as Zoom continues growth apace as well.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/how-google-me...

Anecdote: the company I work for has largely moved from GoToMeeting to Meets. It's better than GTM in almost every way, and we were already paying for GSuite.

>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

AWS has entered the chat

Google is an ad company keeping itself busy. Busywork doesn't communicate with other busywork it just sort of spawns and dies

Yeah, someone in Hangouts probably got promoted for leading the integration of Voice, now years later someone in Voice plans to get promoted for undoing it.

Part of it is their internal obsession for everything being a Chrome extension and all tied to gmail. Just make a freaking native app for something as important as making a call.

For what is worth, I was a happy Grand central user from the very first days.

I wouldn’t even call this “empire building” by people as a sibling comment is suggesting. It is the eternal desire for companies to integrate everything together. Sometimes shit shouldn’t be all integrated together. Single sign on and single profile is not all the panacea that people make it out to be.

I am otherwise a Google fan boy in every sense and I hate what they did with Google Fi. I wanted to signup but I had to choose between giving up my Google Voice number or not having Fi. This is clearly because of this overzealous unification in a big company.

Signup for the free Google voice? Sure we let you choose a number you like? Signup for paid Google Fi, sorry we can’t let you choose a number.

If Microsoft missed the train on search business then Google missed the train on OS business. During Vista days Microsoft was extra-ordinarily vulnerable, people desperately looking for alternatives and some guy at Google decided that the Chrome must be our religion. Overnight priesthood of Chrome had build massive temples that no one outside of Google was interested. They were putting stupid Chrome OS on powerful laptops where hardware didn't get utilized or super under-powered laptops which you always find a scenario you can't use. Imagine if they had taken BSD, put on a great usable UX, an app store, auto sync to cloud and wide range of drivers then a strong alternative to OSX would have been born which would have given run for money to Microsoft.

> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

Google's internal incentive structure strongly favors shipping — at least, it did back in the day, and I believe that's still true now to a great extent. Steve Yegge said it most concisely back in 2006 [1]: "At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system."

The problem is that when one dedicates so much optimization power to shipping, there's less left over for things like maintenance and support. That might not be a huge deal for any individual product, but in the aggregate it sets a higher bar for keeping an initiative running — which presents externally as an excessive proclivity for killing products.

That perception, in turn, erodes user trust in the continuing existence of Google's portfolio of non-flagship products. And that leads to even fewer of those products clearing the bar for maintenance funding, because users are less willing to commit to using a product that may be discontinued.

Google's shipping-first bias was probably a huge advantage for them in the early days. But sometimes a company outgrows aspects of its culture.

[1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/

Part of the problem is also that lot of Google products are free. So there is no real way to measure bottom line impact when they mess with or kill things outright. Their current upper management is basically MBAs focused only on bottom line so birthing new free products and killing them is not something they care too much about. Birthing is driven by empire builders and killing is driven by Ruth Porat.

Things at Google aren't killed because they do or don't make money. Sure people have budget meetings and fight over hardware allocations, but things die because no engineers want to work on them. You don't get promoted for doing your job and maintaining things, you get promoted for inventing and doing new stuff.

That's not entirely true. There have been plenty of shutdowns over the inability to monetize, either directly or via ads or data collection. Products have to have a value add for G or they don't survive. It's just that "money" isn't the only currency. The statement about promotion is spot on though.

The only products I use from Google originated somewhere else except Search and Gmail. Now I don't use Search or Gmail, either, Search started just giving me products to buy around the time they changed the algorithm, and I have lost trust in Gmail.

About every year the chat system (whatever you want to call it) and the voice system (the one that makes phone calls) is going away or being decommissioned or merged or something, and yet in about 8 years of usage I can't tell you what's actually changed.

Some new features, the icon, what it's next to? If they were actually going away I'm not sure how they could communicate that to me in a way I would believe at this point.

Been with Google Voice since it was Grand Central. It's been a wild ride and I'm waiting for Google to kill it entirely. Hangouts was so close. Had SMS and everything. Was only a few features away from becoming a pseudo iMessage for android, then in typical fashion they have gone and done all of this.

Same. Been loving Google Voice / Grand Central for allowing me to both call and text from any device, even through all the rough patches (e.g. no MMS support, losing group texts). My wife cracked her screen and is looking at getting it fixed but the loss of her phone is making her hesitate. I'm tempted to get her on Google Voice but the roughness and concern over its future is why I hesitate.

I'm going to miss Hangouts Integration. It was great accessing GV directly from GMail.

You can still access Google Voice via gmail in the right sidebar.

Unless it’s only a G Suite feature?

Pretty sure that's G Suite/Workspace only. Also, doesn't that only handle voice features? I don't see SMS in that popout.

> Unless it’s only a G Suite feature?

It's GSuite only currently, but I wouldn't be surprised if they brought it to consumer when they actually retire the Hangouts integration.

Enable it in options.

Same. They finally offered me the ability to get off of Hangouts and onto their messenger through Google Fi which I pay for. I've been waiting years for this and it's been a good experience.

I ditched Voice about 2 years ago and just gave everyone my direct # because I started experiencing some quirks, and was afraid they'd kill it.

In fairness I only started with it originally because 1) it seemed like a cool product and 2) at the time cell # portability was much harder.

It really doesn't look like they'll kill it since it's a paid Google Workspace add-on[0], but they very well might do to it what they did to Google+ (keep premium offering, close free offering).

0: https://cloud.google.com/voice#voice_1:~:text=Pricing%20plan...

With all of Google's various messaging platforms throughout the years, I don't even remember WTF "classic" Hangouts is anymore.

Google has gone so far off the deep end with messaging products that they don't know the answer to this question either.

The other day Slack was down and someone proposed we use Google Chat[1], had no idea they built a Slack competitor.

[1] https://chat.google.com/

I opened this up, and there's a new concept called rooms... but there's no way for me to create a room, as far as I can tell? And I don't have access to any others?

Weird.

There's a plus sign at the top of the rooms list (assuming you're logged in with a GSuite account).

It's my personal gmail. Why make this page available if it doesn't work for normal gmail?

They're in the process of opening it up to individuals, but it hasn't formally been announced as generally available.

It's quite nice, really. Good enough for us to drop Slack. Google is slowly replacing all their messaging products with this - Hangouts for GSuite customers is going away, and presumably this is why they drop the Voice integration.

The way they do threading - everything being a thread, at the top level - is more natural than Slack's.

Collaboration with external teams is seamless, you can add any GSuite or GMail accounts to a room. Much less annoying than being logged into a dozen external Slack workspaces.

Automatic permission management for Drive docs. Drop a link into a channel and it'll prompt to auto-add the right permissions that give everyone in the channel access.

> Google is slowly replacing all their messaging products with this

This is exactly what Google used to say about hangouts! https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2017/03/updates-in-g...

> Collaboration with external teams is seamless, you can add any GSuite or GMail accounts to a room.

And when a collaborating company isn’t on Google?

That is totally bonkers, I've used GSuite for years (which I generally really like, although on the topic of mindless Google branding decisions I guess it's now Google Workspace), and I also had no idea this existed.

The message and skimpy page they serve here if you browse that url signed into gmail could be an object lesson in how to invite product failure.

We dropped Slack for GSuite Chat because as a healthcare company bound to HIPAA rules, Slack wanted to charge us $250k to sign a BAA while Google offered it for free. Having a closer integration with Drive and Gmail really makes me wonder why anyone using GSuite would use Slack tbh.

We do screensharing + voice call after chatting all the time. With google chat it sends you to the beginning of a google meet flow. Now you have a silly dance to get a meeting going with the person you are working with.

In slack you click the phone icon, and voice is live, then screen share and voila. Same app etc.

There is a different problem though slack call has many more issues than Google meet. It's anecdotal but it's not infrequent between all the colleagues that we stopped using it altogether.

What are you using instead?

I keep on getting yelled at the zoom is insecure etc. But actually no one actually wants the waiting rooms and no one is willing to name the alternative that they use that is better. I interact with a hundreds of folks often with only 1 or 2 chances to speak, and zoom gets everyone in / on much more reliabily in my experience.

Same with slack. We are using slack between companies now, and trying to figure out google's chat app strategy with video / screen sharing integration is a NIGHTMARE (even though we pay for gsuite so would prefer it). You have meet, hangouts, chat etc. Some things are in gmail, some things are not. The integration between everything is broken (we also use google voice). We've had issues where I guess folks have domain admins that block them joining a meet call? WHAT! So no your invitee can't get in etc.

I think if we just rank on reliability and smoothness of video call, I would rank zoom > google meet > slack.

We do chat, plus a quick audio + screenshare to look at stuff together -> slack has this workflow down.

For video calls + possible screen sharing zoom is smooth.

Meet is fine, but the flow from chat to a screen share is horrendous because the chat product is NOT meet (I don't think- google's product organization here is confusing).

> why anyone using GSuite would use Slack tbh

Because maybe business care more about the future of the tools they use than $10 per user. Most of the Google product in this segment have been axed over the years.

I use hangouts because it's right there in Gmail. The last few timse I looked at Chats, it couldn't connect with my other @gmail users. Now it does. That's nice.

But rooms doesn't work yet (someone else said it's coming to Gmail), and I can't see how to make Chats show up in Gmail yet, so I can't turn off Hangouts yet, and is it even possible to?

Will chat show up in the right sidebar of Gmail, or below the labels in the left bar?

The first iteration was Google Talk, which was a tiny DIV in Google Mail, had a desktop app and I think supported XMPP (maybe that came later?). I don't even remember when it "pivoted" to Hangouts.

I suspect the point the OP was trying to make is that Google has been creating a lot of confusion with their various communication "solutions" over the years.

I remember when everyone used that little div. It was great. Everything was right there in gmail and searchable and simple and it had status. And then Plus and hangouts and all that jazz. It's funny Google Talk(or chats, or hangsouts, not certain of the verbiage) is still sitting in the bottom right of my Gmail, with most of the threads from 2015 or earlier)

> still sitting in the bottom right of my Gmail, with most of the threads from 2015 or earlier

Same. It's like a mini chat cemetery I can visit if I'm feeling nostalgic.

It was XMPP from the very start, and was probably the best XMPP service at the time, it worked with any third party client and had a very nice integration with Gmail (Charl logs were fully searchable within Gmail).

But then in 2013 they got that WhatsApp envy and pivoted to Hangouts, removing XMPP compatibility step by step in phases. This pivot, of course, turned out to be a descent to this madness.

I heard that xmpp is hard to support/maintain on the server side and especially on mobile. The depreciation of xmpp actually also cussed the depreciation of Cloud Print since it depends on xmpp too. https://developers.google.com/cloud-print/docs/rawxmpp

Never heard anything about the server stuff. There used to be issues on mobile related to the fact that XMPP used long lived TCP connections. Disconnects would cause significant pauses in message delivery.

There are still issues using traditional XMPP approach with stream management extension. That's why there are still no any xmpp client for iOS that is not complete crap.

However, we work on releasing a new xmpp client based on reworked protocols to quickly sync chat state with server, it will work just like you expect a modern messenger to work. However, Wewdid stray rather far from 'XMPP compliance suite 2021' to achieve that.

Iirc gcm is still basically batched periodic xmpp messages?

Yes, both FCM (as they are called now) and Apple's APNS seem to be using a customized XMPP connection.

Google chat was great. Back when MSN Messenger was also a thing and chat apps actually worked, were simple and light and kept your history every time you opened the program, unlike Skype, a current product that is worse than its predecessors

"Classic" hangouts is the google hangouts app on android/iOS, and perhaps hangouts.google.com. Dialing capability is being removed from the hangouts app next year, and it's unclear if it will move anywhere else or be killed entirely.

From what I understand, this change affects me personally in a negative way; it will prevent me from making Google Voice calls on my phone.

I use Google Voice with a US-based number that I registered while I lived in the US. I've since moved temporarily to Taiwan and switched to a Taiwanese SIM. Recently, my Google Voice prompted me to re-verify my US-based number (which I no longer have access to) and eventually disassociated it with my account when I didn't do so. So now I do not have a "real" US mobile phone number associated with my account. I cannot associate my Taiwanese number because the country code must match my Google Voice number.

The Google Voice app does not let you make phone calls if you do not have a real phone number registered in your account. I've been using the Hangouts Dialer app to make calls, which doesn't have this requirement. But, per this announcement, it is going away. So after this I'll have no economical way to make calls to the US on my phone (calling via the Taiwanese SIM is expensive). I think I'll work around the problem by associating one of my parents' numbers with my account (any number will do, it's mainly an anti-fraud measure), but it would be great if I didn't have to jump through that hoop.

TextNow worked well for me ... it's $39 a year and all my banks (and the IRS) accept it as my US phone number.

At this point, I'm just waiting for Google Voice to be axed.

I've used it for text/call verification stuff and anything where I don't think its necessary to give my primary number for.

Might get a burner phone when they do in that case.

I really hope they don't. Having a GV number is very handy at times.

I use Google voice as my primary number, and have done so for many years.

A few years ago they pushed me hard to "transition" to Hangouts. It was a one way transition, ie. I couldn't undo it if I didn't like it. I got lazy and never did it.

Now I'm glad I didn't, because apparently I'd be moving back anyway!

But the GVoice app and experience is still awful on iPhone. The only reason I'm still on it is for the spam protection, but even that isn't so good anymore and apparently the built in iPhone one is pretty good now.

Same, at least the app has recently been updated a little bit. It used to be untouched for years and I think the hangouts transition made them cripple once they finally started to update it to encourage switching

I did transition to Hangouts, and it was originally a one-way transition. But about a year or two ago it did get easier to transition back because all of my texting logs from Hangouts started to automatically be imported into regular Google Voice.

> Google to shut down Google Voice

Don't give me such of a freaking heartattack.

I mean... I wouldn't put my eggs in that basket. It's a product that I doubt makes them much money at all and it has a small (relative) user base. I know here on HN there are probably plenty of users of GV but I don't think a single one of my non-tech friends could even tell you what Google Voice is. From my perspective it's been on a slow march to getting shut down for years now.

Don't they listen to your voicemails and calls to target ads at you? Their early tech adopter audience is probably a valuable demographic, but most people don't make lots of calls anymore.

My conspiracy part of my brain pings and says, it gives the NSA convenient access to parsed voice calls which probably pays Google well.

That being said the opposite could be just as true and they will just shut it down, this could very well be a consolidation to see if moving everything to voice is worth maintaining.

It's what Skype did when MS bought them. P2P -> P2S2P

It may happen as it's only limited to US users now.

I have been using Google Voice since around 2014. I can make and receive calls and SMS for no cost to me. Bringing into consideration the recent changes to Google products regarding monetizing them, I expect some changes to Google Voice to come in the near future.

I also have a grandfathered GSuite Basic, which I am wary that Google might cripple it or force me to pay for it.

Net result of this action for most people: When traveling internationally, I would use this feature to call family in the US - for free (it only uses data). Now I can't do this anymore, as it will default to using cell networks (not data).

>New telecommunications regulations are being introduced in the EU and U.S. beginning in 2021. To comply with these new regulations, we need to remove the call phones feature in Hangouts. [1]

It appears that the change is due to new regulations?

[1]: https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangout...

As far as I'm aware the call feature in Voice also uses data.

Lets be honest, it's more likely that they don't want to comply with audit requirements for the new regulations.

As opposed to the regulations not allowing voip calls entirely.

I thought that already happened about a year ago. When I used to dial from voice.google.com it would open a hangouts window. About a year ago they streamlined this to staying within Google Voice, so this announcement seems surprising.

Google products are a mess for a very simple reason. People that launches new products get promoted.

While it is true that Google Voice now has a built-in dialer, I have found that the call quality is significantly worse than with Hangouts. Has anyone else noticed this?

Yes, I experience this too. Poor quality and latency in the Google Voice app (in a totally not subtle way) when calls initiated in Google Hangouts Dialer work fine.

>Next year, Chat will become available as a free service—both in the integrated experience in Gmail and the Chat standalone app.

It was great when Chat [EDIT: This was Google Talk, I think.] was integrated within gmail, both as a ui, and the fact that chat messages were mixed-in with your regular emails, and available for searching. I don't remember when this was removed, but I haven't used it 10+ years. Somehow I doubt the new Chat will work the way it used to, but I hope so.

EDIT 2 (off topic): I tried to look at Google Chat, but first Google wanted me to answer some survey questions, so I agreed to. There's no (apparent) way to navigate the survey questions or revise your replies. I clicked through one question accidentally without answering it. For another question, I mistakenly answered the opposite of what I meant to. Garbage-in, garbage-out.

EDIT 3: After clicking "Get Started" in Google Chat, it appears this is only for groups a la Slack. Why can't I just IM other people with gmail addresses in my address book?

> Why can't I just IM other people with gmail addresses in my address book?

If you have G Suite, you can.

I suspect the experience rolled out to G Suite will eventually make its way to the consumer edition.

> Somehow I doubt the new Chat will work the way it used to, but I hope so.

This is how the new Chat works. New messages get interleaved in between emails.

Doesn't this just mean that calls are done from the Google Voice app?

Yes. It's a very minor change.

And a pleasant one. Google Voice has actually been updated regularly and allows you to search your messages and delete individual messages. Neither of these were possible with Hangouts.

I was a little concerned when I saw this headline, since I still use Hangouts for SMS and I've been ignoring the notification that it's going away. But unless I'm missing something, it looks like my usage is covered by Meet and the newer messages app, which I'm hoping has better UX, particularly around search.

Is anything really being lost here?

Technically it's already gone, inside the hangout tab it just says, "Call phones feature is not available." with a link to https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3205646

Well, that blows. When I lived in a basement, cellular signal was nonexistent, and the only way I could reliably call anyone was by getting a Google Voice number and using the Hangouts Dialer app on my android phone to make the call over WiFi.

These days I've got most of my family using Signal, which can also call over WiFi.

The Google Voice app still exists and is able to make WiFi calls (I've used it).

As confusing as this is, I think it's just the integration. Google Voice has had all of this functionality in a standalone form for years, and that's not going away.

The voice app has its own dialer.

Nowadays there is also Wi-Fi calling which is great for me because right now I'm also living in the basement where cell phone reception is poor.

wifi calling has been around a long time. It suffers from lag, at least for me. Too much lag.

The Google Voice app works fine and supports calling and texting over Wi-Fi.

Google Voice android app doesn't work without giving the permission to "make and manage phone calls". I've used hangouts Voice integration for years and it never needed that permission. I wonder what changed?

The feature in google hangouts I like the most that for a long time was really only a feature I could get in google hangouts is anyone or everyone in a hangout can share their screen. Only recently and I'm not sure exactly how in zoom you can do this too or so i've been told... but this really was the big feature in hangouts... also I must be an unusual person but I just keep my work email (gmail ) in a pinned tab always and it's just an easy place to chat with co-workers and also place test phone calls while hacking on twilio... makes me sad this might be going away :)

So if I read this correctly, it's just losing the idea of placing plain phone calls via Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts also has a video chat feature, and presumably that's still enabled?

An example: you will no longer be able to make and receive phone calls from your gmail.com tab. You'll have to open voice.google.com to do that (though once you do the functionality is equivalent).

Thanks.

And voice.google.com doesn't work for Canadians unfortunately. Correct me if I'm wrong though, and I hope I am

Hangouts is effectively dead. Its functionality has now been split between Voice, Duo, Meet, Messages and Chat.

Simple, isn't it? :D

Hangouts is the only thing I've used for years. I will miss it.

I wonder if Google Fi will continue to work with Hangouts?

No. The article links to this page[0], which has a section on Fi integration. The guidance is to move to Messages which will support SMS and dialing through the Messages app, including web app usage when the phone is off.

[0]: https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangout...

What's awesome is, I did the migration, and now both hangouts and messages get my text messages, even though the "SMS" thingy under Hangouts is disabled. Thankfully most of my friends use Signal as well, so it's mostly 2FA codes that pop up twice.

The problem is this disables RCS is my understanding. So things are still bifurcated.

I can only speak for myself. I have Google Fi service. One of the big selling points for me is the dead simple billing. Another huge selling point is trivial unification of calling and messaging across devices.

The latter feature has been enabled by Hangouts up until now. Now, it seems to be equally fulfilled by Messages. I'm not losing other Messages features, as I've never used them. I'll get to keep my unified calling and messaging across devices. I am relatively happy. I'd prefer no change, but it's been clear that Hangouts would go away for some time now.

But there’s no Messages app for iOS?

iOS seems to have a fully functioning HTML5 browser. (:

There's also no iMessage on Android.

Also, Fi support for iPhones is listed as beta, and I don't think there's ever been full support for iPhones on Fi.

Finally, if Apple were to launch a Fi-like offering, I don't think anyone would expect even marginal support for Android devices. This is not to say that you couldn't get service working on Android, just that there would be literally 0 support from Apple for such a use case.

The whole Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Fi, Messages app is all a mess to me. As someone with various activity in all of these services I just have no idea what is happening. I wish there was a diagram explaining how everything breaks down alongside Google account / identity. There is some issue with RCS compatibility and using Messages for Google Fi. I just want the future to be here and tell me what I can/can't use and how.

I wish they would integrate GV with Google Messages so that I could text from just Google Messages no matter if I'm using GV or my carrier number.

Someone should teach Google management about the Lindy Effect, and how most people use it as a barometer for whether or not to take something seriously.

I've grown accustomed to being able to text people from my computer with weechat/bitlbee/libpurple. Is anyone aware of any ways to continue doing this type of thing when the google voice/hangouts integration stops working?

I specifically like being able to access my messages in a terminal/ncurses-style gui, and being able to log them locally.

You should be able to do this today at https://voice.google.com

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

that's a website, not a TUI

And it's a Google website, which is to say painfully slow - I assumed that this was because I use Firefox right up until I used it on a chromebook and discovered that it still crawled.

Yeah, I know I can do it through the website - I'm specifically interested in being able to do it through a terminal-based program. Partially because it suits my workflow better, and partially because I enjoy being able to have logs of my conversations that I control.

If you can convince your circle to move to signal, they have a CLI tool.

The Google Voice dialer sucks. If you're not on Wi-Fi it won't call over data. Maybe this would have been a sensible restriction 10 years ago but now it's totally silly. I used the Hangouts dialer all the time when travelling internationally to avoid ludicrous international call fees.

I use it as a daily driver and have no issues like you mention. Hangouts dialer on the other hand would frequently have call quality issues for me.

This headline wraps on mobile after Voice, and my heart skipped a beat.

I still have a fair number of physical business cards left. It’s only a matter of time before the Google cancel machine renders them useless. Hopefully I run out before then.

My personal card, in contrast, doesn’t have a phone number on it at all, just email.

Forcing me to sign into "messages" for voice calling is bad for my personal security. Some sites still only provide 2 factor via SMS. I don't want to be forced to receive them on my computer, when my phone is the 2 factor device.

Don't like this change one bit.

What's forcing you to use your computer? Google Voice has a fully functioning mobile app.

I'm a Google Fi user. To be able to make and receive voice calls from my desktop I'll have to sign into 'messages' which forces the sms part as well. I prefer to not receive sms on desktop but love voice calls.

Will integrate this with their yet another new messaging platform Yallo !

Will not be happy if they ever shut down Google Voice. It's my spam and online dating phone number. Like if we didnt work out you are like spam to me.. to be deleted/ignored lol

I have literally zero idea what app I'm supposed to use for texts/calls, and I'm on Google Fi... Is Fi about to be axed?

No. Google message has a web app already that you can use. You can now login to google message with your google account (no need to do the awkward qr code thing) and call/text from there. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/23/new-messages-for-we...

No!!!! This is how I operate as a human being when my phone gets stolen from my toddler!

Too bad, I used this on occasion

Will this include texting?

Based on an email I received from Google Fi, yes...

Google is dysfunctional. Their promo incentives favor short-term thinking.

The original founders are gone.

The only reason they're alive is their ad/search moat. It's a walking IBM/Oracle, otherwise.

Don't forget when it leaked a year or so ago that even Google Cloud Platform is on their chopping block if they don't meet targets.

I wouldn't trust this company with anything. Photos, music, youtube videos, mail. They do not care.

It's fun to ride on tidal waves like reorgs though!

Unless you depend on Google's services, yes.

Or simply want to chat with your friends on their platform without nervously keeping a finger on the pulse. Chat in gmail, or hangouts? Oh that’s google plus now, wait it isn’t plus. Google voice? Google duo? Is that still a thing? Is Google meet the same as hangouts?

All my friends churned away from google’s IM solutions and I doubt we’re ever coming back. Who’s got time for all that?

They moved chat from gmail for a while exclusively to Google+ to promote it, killing off their chat advantage and end the end they also failed to make Google+ take off.

Did somebody say Google Wave?

> Their promo incentives favor short-term thinking.

Can you please explain more?

I have never worked for Google, but the story in previous similar discussions had been that Google’s performance reviews largely weigh launching new products to the exclusion of everything, so anyone who wants to get promoted can’t afford to “get stuck” maintaining an existing product without at least a significant rewrite.

Ah ok. I have heard that story as well.

This is basically true, although "to the exclusion of everything else" is more extreme than my experience. At the time I left ~5 years ago, it was common for promotion rejections to be given the explanation "the current thing that you're working on hasn't launched yet, so the promotion committee couldn't properly assess your impact. If you successfully launch it, that would clearly demonstrate impact." If you were a shoo-in via your existing work (i.e. you were obviously underpromoted), then it wouldn't matter as much. But since most people were trying to get promoted the instant they had a plausible case, it meant that a lot of people were focused on launching One Last Thing.

Since I left, I understand that they've revamped the promotions up to Senior such that managers that are familiar with your work consider your promotion instead of a random committee. I'm curious to hear whether that has affected the "launch launch launch" push for promotions under staff engineer. I know through my network that staff+ promotions can still be held up for this reason.

Promotion "committee" ??

Fairly normal in larger organizations, has been the case in my past 3 jobs.

The idea is to reduce gamesmanship in promotion decisions (my whole team is senior engineers, etc.), and to provide some uniformity across the organization. They usually also have some budgetary discretion as well, as they have to balance whatever pool of money is available for promotions, COL adjustments, and merit based raises.

Fairly normal in larger organizations, has been the case in my past 3 jobs.

I guess my last several orgs just kept that away from me then, for whatever reasons they had. It's honestly surprisingly new to me that "committees" for such a thing are "normal" at large orgs.

In those cases, I had a lot of autonomy over promotions-as a leader, other than the usual "get approval from the CFO for funding if there is a raise involved"; beyond that, coordinating promotions with my director what the promotion would entail was all there was to it.

Usually it's only involved on higher-level promotions (like, only 5% of less of engineers have ever had a promotion going through the committee), but it's fairly common to have a corporate promotion committee at companies larger than a few thousand employees.

I don't have much information or much of an explanation.

But it seems to me like there was a big push a couple years ago to integrate everything with G+. Someone collected the political capital inside the company to get this to be a mandate for the company, a direction for everyone to head.

Well, it really wasn't that bad, but no the gangbusters success Google hoped for (not sure how anything with the flimsiest tiniest Read-Only api like that would ever get anywhere?).

Since then it seems like there's a corporation, but mostly a lot of different teams marching to different drummers. It's pretty common in corporate world that managers & mini-executives & executives push for huge home run hits, within their fief, then leverage that smashing success to push for even bigger agendas. There's little incentive to maintain & care for a product well: everything is about metrics, & the existing user base's retention is usually not all that influenced by the love & care of a carefully thoughtfully evolved product. Trying to work across teams, to create something that works consistently across products, is even harder, as the organizational complexity of bringing more & more teams in keeps increasing.

Organizational complexity grows. Teams seek autonomy & wins. Products get focus. Ecosystems & long-burning initiatives are much much much much harder to sheppard forward. Little of this is unique to Google.

Perf reviewers favor people that deliver new projects, not keeping the lights on in old ones.

For those who care, this is the article & HN discussion about the leaked memo that GCP may be axed if they don’t reach certain targets by 2023:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

I can't read the story, just the first bit, but it says "risk losing funding" not "axe".

Proprietary software without funding is software without maintainers, another way of saying dead by most people's definition.

Would you stake your company or project on GCP if Google decided it was going to reduce funding of the platform?

They show time and time again that they're willing to pull the rug out from under people that depend on their platforms.

Same thing.

It's the first death pang to not be funded in a company the lives on getting promoted by 'new features or products'

The longer this goes on the more I try to iteratively decouple myself from google. For those with a google voice number, any suggestions on best choice for porting your number elsewher?

Twilio, possibly.

As someone who tried this, it's problematic - no support for group texts and iffy support for MMS attachments. I really wanted it to work, but occasionally even my 2FA codes would just not arrive.

When did you try it and what did you try?

Approx a year ago, ending maybe six months ago.

One of the only reasons I'm still with Google Voice is because having your number with them mitigates (far as I can tell) SIM swap attacks. Yeah, someone can swap my SIM, but effectively nothing goes to the carrier number, just the GV number, which is much harder to socially engineer (even if some of that is because it's impossible to get someone on the phone).

If you tightly lock down your GV account, it should be much more difficult to compromise than a random cell carrier. I don't know if there's a comparable service, but I'm dying to pay for one, if only to not have a single point of failure.

I’m quite happy with GV for my 2FA except for the fact that some banks refuse to deliver messages to it.

Yeah you nailed the reason that I still use them as my primary number. The problem is who knows if they will kill voice. It just seems random when they decide to kill products. I imagine that they have some kind of scorecard for apps, but it's a precarious place to be that your primary number sits with a product that could be killed on a whim. I agree with you, I would pay in a heartbeat for a service that I knew was going to stick around.

If you have a newer phone with esim you can port to a carrier that supports esim.

This is the stickiest thing I've got by far. It is so nice to have a "front" phone number with SMS (and sometimes MMS) capabilities & voicemail capabilities that can be used from a web browser. If I thought that Google was capable of selling me the service as a valued customer rather than the product, I'd be happy to pay for it.

I've looked around at a few possibilities and narrowed it down to two I intend to try:

* https://jmp.chat/ plus maybe http://getkaiwa.com/ -- on the fiddly side, but with great fiddliness comes great flexibility, maybe?

* https://www.openphone.co/ -- seems more turnkey

https://jmp.chat/ supports both MMS and group texting, so it would give you the full Google Voice feature set. I'm not aware of any other service like this that supports group texting - most other services silently ignore group texts, so just be aware of that.

There's also https://wiki.soprani.ca/VonageSetup if you want to host the alternative yourself (though it doesn't support group texting).

I use dialpad.

The service isn't free but the call quality is far better than Google voice and you can text from your number with an app on your phone or computer.

I guess the guys who created grandstation (what turned into Google voice) started this company.

Isn’t dialpad much older than google voice? I remember using it for free, with my dialup connection, to call relatives in the US. Early 2000s

It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy eventually. As Google shuts down random services during fits of pique, they build a reputation for being mercurial and unreliable. And then when they actually need to see significant numbers to justify large projects (Stadia, GCP), they struggle to pull in users because nobody trusts them. Google eventually pulls the plug due to low adoption, and all consumers biases against relying on Google are validated.

I know someone who left Google about 6 months ago after having worked there for 12 years, and I had a lot of interesting conversations with them recently. I left Google many years ago.

Google is in the midst of an epic struggle to transform itself. I think it's succeeding in turning into a sustainable post-ads company, and I think Google will be around for many years to come. However the transformation is not pleasant for many of the SWEs, particularly those in GCP.

I can say with some confidence that GCP is not in peril. TK is turning the ship around, and a fresh infusion of "conventional company" executives are doing what it takes to make the changes happen. A lot of Google SWEs are suddenly being directly exposed to revenue targets that they have to meet by clawing enterprise sales from Amazon and Microsoft. Not all of them are up to the task, and many are fleeing to... well, I bet many of them are getting a "rude awakening" about how the tech industry outside of their popping Google bubble has to operate.

All of the sudden they can't sit back in their castle and wave their "A/B test" wands to figure out which experiments draw in 20,000 daily users vs. 17,000 daily users. Instead they have to take orders from sales and PM as they scream at them to hurry up and build features to get 5 or 6 more enterprise contracts signed by such-and-such a date. Google SWEs have never needed to pay any heed to sales or PM; they just used to do whatever they felt like doing, launching it, creatively selecting metrics that demonstrate "success," collecting their promos, and dancing along to the next shiny thing.

That fantasy world is gone.

As ads revenue falters, the real world is slamming into Google full-force. I actually expect the opposite of "not caring" about photos, music, etc. to happen. Google is quickly moving into a phase where a reputation for shipping and supporting stable, durable, and compatible solutions is what it desperately needs in order to win and keep enterprise customers. We're going to see it happen, and the Google SWEs who survive are the ones who are willing to humble themselves, roll up their sleeves, and compete head-to-head with AWS and Azure SWEs on a level playing field. It will mean harder work for less pay, fewer promos, and less autonomy.

I have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone working at Google today. It's still a very privileged place to work, especially in the midst of the global turmoil going on around us right now. I do, however, have little patience for any Google SWEs who still expect the "ship shiny, collect promo" career path to work out for them there.

If that shift you described is indeed under way then public relations should all be fired. Google has a well deserved horrible track record and no serious enterprises should consider it.

This implies that the incentives are any saner when driven by sales, which isn't necessarily true. At least on the enterprise end (which is presumably where GCP wants to make a significant chunk of its revenue), sales can be equally driven by what's essentially "ship shiny", it's just that the rewards are even more immediate (collect commission).

Salespeople will gladly hound engineering teams to pound out an MVP for whatever their particular prospects want this quarter, and a shiny MVP is often enough to close a deal so long as it holds up in a demo with managers whomever has purchasing power. Once that's done, sales is happy to forget about that product, or at least convince themselves that it working in a demo means it will work well in production (they lack the technical competence to see the inevitable holes that will appear down the road if the MVP isn't developed past minimum viability).

If next quarter's customers want a different set of features, well, sales will push for those, often to the detriment of fleshing out existing functionality or ensuring they're stable and maintainable. They're insulated from any pain that results from half-baked products if the people tasked with actually using products aren't those with purchasing power, and in the enterprise context, they usually aren't, and are themselves insulated from line workers who could tell them they've essentially bought a lemon, or more the promise of functionality instead of actual functionality.

Not sure about how things are in the States but around my neck of the woods (Eastern European country and EU member) in order to win enterprise&government contracts you need contacts, lots of them, actively maintained. Microsoft is by far the best at this, they've been at this game for what, 20, 30 years? That's why Azure has bigger numbers than GCP and it's the only one capable of confronting AWS head-on (AWS which is winning merely on technical merits, at least for now).

My gf works for a Microsoft cloud re-seller (among other things) and I've recently asked her if GCP has ever come into the conversation when it came to their clients (clients among which are a few government entities), her answer was "never", followed by a quick laugh, as in "who would even ask such a thing?" Google and its cloud offering is missing in action around here big time, and I have a feeling the same situation happens in other European countries. They still have this mistaken belief that people will come to them hat in hand just because they're Google, but when it comes to the cloud market that has never been the case.

> We're going to see it happen, and the Google SWEs who survive are the ones who are willing to humble themselves, roll up their sleeves, and compete head-to-head with AWS and Azure SWEs on a level playing field. It will mean harder work for less pay, fewer promos, and less autonomy.

I'd argue an organization needs to reward these things properly to happen. People won't give up promo to do right by the business, the business needs to give promo for the right things. If nothing changes then it's far more likely the company is in deep trouble long-term.

> Their promo incentives favor short-term thinking.

I'm seriously asking myself these days if this is how Google dies, and we're just seeing the early signs of it.

If anything, I think this is a great reason why Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook should be broken up.

There's an argument from an anti-monopoly / competition point of view. But perhaps organisational as well?

Perhaps smaller companies which favour local (product focused) concerns would actually benefit all of us?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25164921.

I trusted them with my music collection and they shut the service down in favor of the vastly inferior YouTube Music.

Does Google have a choice, though? The crux of the problem is who gets to capture the value. Conventional companies don't let employees capture value, so employees rationally act like employees and not like business owners. This is why Zoom's founder left Cisco. This is why the GCP's "most important person" will rationally jump ship shortly before the tough conversation about revenue targets.

I wonder if/when they're going to shutdown Google Voice too? What business value does it bring them other than more data collection?

They have the best leetcoders!! They are elite!! No problems what so ever with these geniuses!!

I agree

This is dumb. Every time you do one of these migrations you lose a non-trivial percentage of your users. I legit no longer know which Google chat program I'm supposed to use on my iPhone anymore. It's even worse on Android. It'd cost them very little to "componentize" voice calling feature and reduce maintenance cost that way by simply using the same component in both programs. But, any large organization is doomed to ship its org chart, which is what I suspect is happening here. Again.

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